HaloFollower runs down for us the latest in the HuntTheTruth viral campaign for Halo 5: Guardians. You can subscribe to HaloFollower on YouTube here.
This surrounds a recent picture that Giraud took of Master Chief defending New Mombasa. You may remember this as the cover art of Halo 2.
The image was apparently manipulated to present a more heroic image of the Chief, one who seemed more dominant over his enemies than he actually was. They cleaned up his armor of blood and fixed up parts of him that are blurry. They then cropped out images of banshees and other enemies surrounding him in the background. They even go out of their way to remove pictures of other Marines in the area.
The allegation is clear; the image of Master Chief that we received, even from the earlier Halo games, has been manipulated to make him seem more heroic and larger than life than he actually is. It’s a clever way of twisting around Microsoft’s prior promotion of Master Chief and Halo as the de facto Xbox mascot. In a way, it disparages Microsoft’s own efforts to push Chief as the hero everyone likes to play as.
So it’s starting to look more like the HunttheTruth campaign is a way for Microsoft to pick apart the prior Halo narrative they created, in the service of making a new one.
Halo 5: Guardianswill be released on 2015 exclusively for Xbox One.